


A Heartbeat's Words

by the_musical_alchemist



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Royai - Freeform, fmab - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-17 20:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 17,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4681022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_musical_alchemist/pseuds/the_musical_alchemist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They don’t express themselves with anything but their overt willingness to die for each other. Titles shield them from the world, but they do nothing to protect them from each other.</i>
</p><p>A compilation of unrelated RoyAi drabbles and one shots. Warnings will be at the beginning of each if/when they apply!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Heartbeat's Words

Only in her sleep does she get to be Riza. Broken free from the prison of her rank, she’s at peace with just this.

It’s not without consequence or without pain. The exposure stings like an open wound but she is willing to pretend she’s numb to it, if just for this ephemeral moment.

So she imagines her name’s bitterness negated by the sweet sound of his voice when he says it. She pretends the morning light isn’t imminent, waiting to entrap her without the mercy of isolation where she will see the beauty she’s deprived of, unable to grasp it for herself. She pretends because it’s the only thing keeping her together.

In her sleep, she is not Lieutenant or Hawkeye. She is Riza and she is his.

The deep notes of his voice caress her in places hands never could. When he smiles, and his dark eyes rest comfortably in her gaze, her pulse steadies. Loving him and being loved by him doesn’t ignite her senses, rather, it brings her peace. Because they are not two people creating a spark. They are only intertwining parts of a single heart, beating as one, thriving as one. They don’t coexist. They just  _are_.

His fingertips lightly trace the contours of her face, and she feels a pull in the pit of her stomach. An eager, blissful sensation that tells her,  _Yes. This is right. We’re finally right._

“Thank you,” he tells her, leaning down to rest his forehead against hers. His thumb slides down her cheek, settling against the curve of her jaw.

“For what?” she asks, involuntarily arching toward him. His free arm wraps around her waist, pulling her closer. His heart beats between their chests, a steady metronome tapping in unison to her own.

“For protecting me,” he says. His breath is warm against her lips. “For saving me when I lost sight of myself. For bringing me back to you.”

She doesn’t say anything, because they have never needed words. What she does is closes her eyes and softly runs her fingers through his hair, down to the nape of his neck. He shivers from her touch, his breath hitching. Then she kisses him, without fervor, but with patience. To taste his lips, memorize how they feel moving against her own. To ingrain this moment so well into her mind that the indentations of it will follow her when she wakes up.

“Riza,” he says, when they pull apart. The letters of her name fit so beautifully on his tongue.

“Roy,” she says back, her lips twitching into a smile. His name is bittersweet on hers, but she focuses more on the euphony of it. How saying his name frees something inside of her.

Slowly, the image of him begins to fade as blackness tugs the edges of her vision. Suddenly, she’s conscious again and can feel the stiff hospital sheets underneath her. She blinks as her dream ebbs away, leaving her hollow, staring into a dimmed light fixture on the ceiling.

Perhaps the bed creaked some because she hears a soft voice call to her from her right.

“Lieutenant?”

She squeezes her eyes shut, as the bliss from a few moments ago morphs into a grotesque ache in the center of her chest.

Morning light has yet to come, as it’s the middle of the night. But the walls have returned nonetheless.

She takes a deep breath before sitting up, as the movement still hurts her neck now that she’s awake. Beside her, she hears Roy--the Colonel--sigh.

“Are you awake?” he asks, a slight tremor to his voice. “Is it morning?”

He can no longer see her, even if he wanted to. She looks to him, focusing on his vacant stare. She wonders if in his own dreams, he isn’t blind and revels in the fact that he can see her face.

Likely not. Given all that’s happened, she wonders if there is any room left in his mind for pleasant dreams.

“I’m awake, sir,” she says quietly. His body almost sags with relief. She notes that he’s clutching his bedsheets with shaking hands. His chest rises and falls in an anxious, uneven rhythm.

“It’s over,” she assures him. Her own pulse races at the sight of him so distraught. She wants to sit with him, to take his trembling hands in her own and assure him that she’s here and the battle is behind them.

But right now, he’s her Colonel and she’s his Lieutenant. And there are boundaries that cannot be crossed. Not without compromising their goals. They didn’t come this far to throw it away in a moment of weakness.

She swallows hard, concentrating so that her words do not falter. “The white space you’d mentioned. And the gate where you met Truth. That’s the last thing you saw. It’s only normal that it’s your clearest memory.”

He nods, exhaling. He directs his unseeing eyes in her general direction, and the subtlest of smiles crosses his lips.

“You’re all right?” he asks her.

“Yes, sir.”

He looks down, but he’s visibly relieved. “I’m glad.”

They sit in silence, and though he’s stopped shaking, he’s still tense. She leans against the bed’s headboard and asks, “Colonel, can you tell me about Ishval? What are our plans for it?”

Riza says this while casting a glance at the clock on the wall that tells her it’s half past three in the morning. She knows he will never tell her he’s too shaken up to go back to sleep. He’ll never ask her to stay up with him, talking about anything but the Promised Day to put his mind at ease. He’ll never even let on that the sound of her voice, whether she’s talking about Ishval or reciting phone numbers out of an address book, is all he needs to know that everything is okay.

Because he doesn’t have to. She already knows. And he knows that she does.

He smiles more, pushing his fringe back with his hands, and settles against his headboard. He starts to talk about his dreams, their goals, and the future. And Riza drinks in his moment of solace, listening to and absorbing every word.

He doesn’t thank her because he doesn’t have to. She already knows.

And they don’t speak about what happened under the tunnels, or how catastrophically they love each other, because there isn’t any need to. They are a single heart. And the heart doesn’t need words.


	2. Undeserving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bit of pillow talk. Unrelated to the previous chapter.

Afterward, they don’t speak for a long while. There is no fervency in saying as much as they possibly can. If anything that time has since passed. It's ironic and terribly sad how what could have been their only and last time to speak was when their words were the most numbered.

Riza thinks of the nights she spent riddled with anxiety, treading carefully around dark corners in fear that the shadows would swallow her whole. She was fine, of course, and she would be fine so long as she never surrendered the will to fight. But even with her own inherent strength and the foggy knowledge that she was capable of holding her own, his absence was visceral. A physical ache in her hollowed stomach. Like it had the night of her first encounter with the homunculus Pride, she knew the sound of his voice would bring her peace.

His fingertips glide up and down her bare back. Her skin pebbles with goosebumps in response. Slowly, her eyelids grow heavy. She has the urge to snuggle closer to him, but this moment feels as fragile as glass. If she so much as twitches, maybe he’ll stop. She doesn’t want him to stop. They’ve waited too long.

The reasons why they don’t deserve this have plagued her every day since Ishval. Why should she be allowed something so beautiful when her stained hands are so ugly? Why should he? It doesn’t matter how much they’ve fixed, and how many people they’ve saved since then. It will never amount to all they destroyed.

She wonders how he, an alchemist, can stand to touch her with such tenderness. How he can live off of the principle of equivalent exchange and still let her love him the way that she does. Maybe she is wrong to question it since she doesn’t quite understand it herself.

She lies curled against him, her hand resting on his chest. Softly, her thumb moves back and forth over his bare skin, as if that will ingrain the memory of this more substantially.

Perhaps they don’t deserve this. Perhaps they’re monsters, guilty of incorrigible things, unjustly sharing something beautiful. But right now, she’d rather pretend she’s alright with that.

“Can I ask you something?” he murmurs. His fingers curl in and out against her back now. She releases a slow, blissful sigh.

“Of course,” she says.

His lips brush against the top of her head while he chooses his words. Warm breath stirs her hair. “If I asked you to stop watching my back...would you?”

Riza isn’t stalled by this. Despite herself, she chuckles. “Would you ever ask me to?”

His hand comes to rest on the scar tissue that has marred her shoulder blade. Softly, he traces where the burnt and healed flesh stitch together with his finger. “I suppose not.”

“Then it’s a silly question,” she says. Even if their sins weren’t a large enough wedge in between them, she wouldn’t consider such a thing. Being a soldier is all she has left in a world that’s taken everything from her.

“I don’t want you to die for me,” he says, burying his nose into her hair.

“So I won’t die.” She closes her eyes as his hand finds the small of her back to close the little distance left between them. He shifts a little so that he’s hugging her to him, one hand in her short hair, entangling it with his fingers. “You gave me orders not to die, remember?”

“Riza,” he says, drawing in a deep breath. “Please.”

“Nothing changes,” she says, slipping her right arm around his waist. She presses a kiss to the curve of his neck. “You lead, and I follow. I’ll protect you. And we’re going to right as much as we can before we die.”

He nods, tightening his hold on her. A comfortable silence settles over them, leaving the two to the steady rhythm of each other's familiar heartbeat.

Maybe a minute later, Roy asks, “Did I ever tell you that I love you?”

The words flutter in her stomach. An involuntary smile breaks out across her face. She moves closer to him, burying her face into his chest.

“No,” she murmurs. “You didn’t need to.”

“You love me too,” he says, not as a question, but without arrogance either. Riza nods, curling her fingers in where they meet his skin.

“Yes,” she says.

“Rotten luck we have then, isn’t it?” He smiles, but there’s an undertone of longing that Riza understands far too well.

“Yes,” she says again, focusing on the warmth of his arms and the low rumble of his voice. Indulging in this underserved moment of immutable bliss. Ignoring their impending tomorrow, where she’ll fall into step behind him just like always and pretend it never happened. “Rotten luck indeed.”


	3. Our Fleeting Seconds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning! Insinuated character deaths!

They shouldn’t have been allowed this moment, but when a person’s lifespan is definitively cut, others tend to be a lot more lenient. Is has a lot to do with the concept of death being such an abstract, intangible thing for so many. Out of sight, out of mind. 

The harsh reality is that everyone’s days are numbered. In a world built on equivalent exchange, that only makes sense. You were given life, so you must one day give it back.

You were born, and so you will die. 

But even with that being an incontrovertible fact of the universe, people take far too much comfort in postponing the inevitable. Not thinking about it. Living each day as if tomorrow will always be there to rectify all you did wrong. 

When the end is suddenly visible, all of that changes. 

It’s the reason death row prisoners are given one last meal. There’s something gratifying in making a person’s final moments comfortable. No matter what they’ve done or all they destroyed, they are human enough to be worthy of one last glimmer of light before the dark takes them away.

Roy has one more hour before that light goes out for good. His bones feel heavy and restless, and it’s all he can do to keep his eyes open. But the thought of missing even one second of this twists something inside of him so painfully he couldn’t fall asleep even if he wanted to. 

She hasn’t said a word since the guards escorted her in. Her legs are drawn up, and she rests her chin on her knees, looking at him with eyes anyone else would think fierce. But Roy can read her more absolutely than he can anything in a written language. Her glances, mannerisms, breaths and heartbeats are pervasive, a pulse beneath his own skin. 

She’s determined, because she isn’t one to go back once she’s made a choice for herself. But like the water’s current underneath a hard layer of ice, there is so much more. There is remorse for the stolen lives that brought her here. Sadness that there is nothing left for them after this. Fear of what lies ahead. And self-hatred for feeling anything that selfish.

“I wish you weren’t going with me,” he says, his voice thick.

Riza lifts her head. She opens her mouth to speak, but quickly refrains, opting to instead to rest her hands on her knees. 

Roy doesn’t say she shouldn’t follow him. Because that would be a lie. They both deserve this. There is no denying it. He only wishes, more than he’s ever wished anything in his life, that things were different. 

Finally, she speaks. Her voice is hoarse, but far from weak. The side of her mouth almost twitches into a lopsided smile. “All the way to Hell. We only have a little way more to go.”

Despite himself, he chuckles. Because if he doesn’t, he fears he may break so irreparably he’ll lose the stability needed to be here with her. 

“So we do.” He wrings out his hands, exhaling a shaky breath. He rests his gaze in hers because that’s where it’s comfortable. Her dark, gold-flecked eyes have been home to him for too long. It’s enough for him to swallow the pain of looking at her, squelching the ache in his chest that follows the reminder of their fleeting seconds together.

“You know that I would have given everything up if you’d asked me to,” he says finally. His throat feels tight. “Maybe not at first. Maybe not even before the Promised Day. But…” he fights the inclination to close his eyes. His hands begin to shake and he isn’t sure if it’s from fatigue, emotion, or dread. “A lot changed for me under the tunnels. When I lost sight of myself and you guided me back...different things started to matter. The thought of losing it all...losing _you_ …” he trails off to collect his breath. His heart races, like he’d just run all the way across the desert from Xing without stopping. 

“You don’t have to say it,” Riza murmurs, averting her eyes. When she tightens her arms around her knees, her shoulders tremble.

“That’s not the point, though,” says Roy, his breath catching in his throat. “Because for you, I never needed to give up. You never would have let me anyway.”

“I suppose I’m stubborn that way,” Riza says, closing her eyes.

“It’s why I’m alive,” he points out, maybe a little solemnly given the circumstance. “That and your insubordination has saved my life more times than I can count.”

Riza smiles like she’s going to laugh, but too quickly swallows, screwing her eyes shut more tightly.

Roy wishes he could just take her in his arms and somehow chase away her suffering. But he can’t. He knows her too well.

“There’s nothing more we can do for them,” he says finally.

“I hate that.”

“I know.”

He drags his hands down his face, then stares at his open palms. If there was a way to go back to the first day of his apprenticeship, would he do anything differently? Knowing all that he knows now? Would it have been easier to walk away than to sin so incorrigibly only to spend the remaining years of his life trying to remedy it? Would this world have been better off without a Flame Alchemist? 

Perhaps.

He laces his fingers and rests his forehead on his joined hands. He’s done so much good-- _they_ have, together--but was this prewritten? Was his beauty only viable in the wake of their destruction? 

He doesn’t want to believe that. It isn’t a world worth saving, after all. 

This, where they are, is how things are meant to be. Not because it was written in the stars, or anything quite so inevitable. Because he made a choice. And so did she.

“I know this isn’t about us,” he says. “And I shouldn’t be vain enough to think so for even a second...but--”

“Don’t say it,” she says, with a little more conviction than before. Her knuckles are white from how tightly she grips her knees. She draws in a long breath, bracing herself as if for a blow to the chest. 

“Riza--”

“It doesn’t _matter_.” She lets go of her knees and buries her face into her hands. Running one through her hair, she swallows a sob. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. It isn’t like there’s a life for us outside this cell. It isn’t going to make this any less hard and it sure as hell isn’t going to bring any of _them_ back.” She grips the hair at the base of her neck with both hands now, and her next words are brittle. “We don’t need to say how we feel. We never have.”

When she finally catches his gaze again, he’s taken aback by the iron in it. Her eyes are rimmed in red, glazed with unshed tears, but they pierce him. “I’ve made peace with this. Equivalent exchange. Our sins for the innocence of those after us. Our lives for theirs.”

As if that was something she needed to have said. No matter how terrified she is, she’ll never back away. It’s why he trusts her so implicitly. 

“You’re right,” he says. He gets up from his position against the wall and relocates so he sits in front of her. His hands rest on her feet and he can feel the shift in her breathing, the quickening of her pulse. “About everything.”

He brings one hand up to her chin, tilting her head so they’re looking at each other. Her lips part, and he instinctively brushes his thumb across them, marveling at how a woman so hard and unwavering can have skin so delicate, soft and warm. 

How someone on death row can feel so alive.

“I won’t say it if you don’t want me to,” he says, her gold-flecked eyes melting into his intent gaze. “That’s a promise.”

Riza brings her legs down and leans forward, catching his lips in a kiss, sinking her fingers into his hair. Roy’s arm circles her waist, pulling her flush against him. His body reacts before his mind is able to make sense of it, moving against her like a wave to her current, breathing her in like a drowning man taking his first gasp of air. It’s messy, and painful, and he hates it, he hates it, he _hates it_ because of how much he needs it. How much he loves her. 

Her hands draw back, resting on either side of his face. The bridge of her nose brushes his, and her breaths are short and hot, as if fragments of herself were flying all around them like embers off a flame. 

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” she whispers, kissing the side of his mouth. Her eyes are closed and she’s absolutely flushed. Roy keeps one hand on the small of her back, but cradles the back of her head with the other, burying his fingers into her blond mess of hair. “For either of us.”

“It’s enough,” he tells her. _It’s more than we deserve_.

“For us,” she agrees, echoing his thoughts. 

Riza sits back on her heels, her hands falling to her lap. She doesn’t exactly smile, but she sags forward, at peace. Roy knows she’s afraid. He knows she’s angry. But at the very least, she’s here and they are together. Her eyes are a book only he can read, after all. 

“How much longer?” she asks.

Roy shakes his head. “Less than an hour.”

Her eyes close in lament, though he’s certain it isn’t for themselves. She nods. 

“You’ll stay with me?” he asks. “I don’t mean to ask if you’ll follow me, because I know the answer to that already. But will you--”

“Of course I will, Roy,” she says, a sad smile touching her lips.

“Together, then.” He reaches for her hand and she allows him to take it. He runs his thumb over her calloused palm, rough from the grip of her rifle. But her fingers feel delicate when they weave through his. Because underneath the skin of a monster and the resolve of a protector, she’s only ever been human. 

She bows her head, and her forehead rests against his shoulder. His free hand reflexively combs through her hair. 

“Together,” she says.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're following these drabbles, thank you so much! I know I've been neglecting them as Survivor: Not Amestris is updated far more often, but I am still working on them. I have another that I want to post soon as well. Thank you again for reading <3


	4. Storm

 

“Remind me what in the hell you’re all doing in my apartment?” Roy grumbles, more to himself than his companions, as he rummages for batteries in his kitchen drawer.

AA, Fuery had said. He glances at the Sergeant Major who sits cross-legged on the living room floor with a cable in between his teeth and another coiled around his wrist.

Roy’s gaze travels around the room, landing on Rebecca who stares out the window with narrowed eyes. A perfectly normal thing to do in any other circumstance. When it isn’t rattling from the impact of the most savage torrential storm Amestris has seen in years, for one.

“Catalina!” he calls, “Move away from there!”

She cocks an eyebrow and jabs her thumb in its direction. “This window is going to blow, Mustang.”

Roy sets his hands on the counter and sighs deeply, but Rebecca does not avert her eyes. When he looks back up, she tilts her head down and crosses her arms, waiting.

“I’m an alchemist,” he says at last. “If it breaks, I’ll fix it.”

She snorts and he grips the edge of the counter, reminding himself that despite all her shortcomings, she is Hawkeye’s closest friend and that has to be for some reason. And of course, he also can’t forget her invaluable help on the Promised Day.

“You’re just too big a cheapskate to buy real shutters,” she mutters, rolling her eyes.

But how she tests him sometimes.

“She’s right, boss,” says Havoc from the sofa. He nods his head in its direction. “That window won’t last and if it does blow, it might be a little hard to fix in a storm like this.”

“What do you mean  _if_? It’s definitely going to blow,” Rebecca says.

“God help me,” Roy says, bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. Breda walks in from the next room with an armload of candles. He sets them down and shoots Roy a questioning look.

“Hurricane parties are a lot more fun in the movies, huh, Colonel?” he asks with a smirk.

“I’d hardly call this a party,” says Roy, returning his attention to the drawer that he’s maybe opened twice in his entire life. Finally, he finds that blasted pack of AA batteries and drops it on the counter. “The Lieutenant and I were going to go over some of what was discussed at our last meeting and as soon as we heard the storm was going to be this bad, Catalina was on her like a leech.”

Breda chuckles, looking over at the others. “I’ll take a wild guess and say Havoc followed Catalina.”

“And Fuery didn’t want to spend the night alone in the dorms,” Roy continues, marginally irked, “and at that point, hey, why not just get the whole team together?”

“Poor Falman,” says Breda, somewhat woefully.

“I’m envious of Falman,” Roy says, pushing the drawer closed. “This storm isn’t going anywhere near Briggs.”

Lightning floods the room in a flash of white, and an explosion of thunder sounds seconds later. Involuntarily, Roy grips the edge of the counter again.

“Shit,” Breda mutters. “I’ve heard gunshots that sounded less threatening.”

“Bad storm,” Roy agrees. He takes the batteries off the counter and joins the others in the living room, Breda in tow.

Rebecca begrudgingly moves away from the window to join Havoc on the sofa. Roy can’t help but smirk when he sees his lieutenant sit up a little straighter and run a hand through his fringe.

“Thank you, sir,” Fuery says when Roy hands him the pack. He looks toward the window with furrowed eyebrows. “It’s only a matter of time before we lose power. I want to make sure we have everything ready when that happens.”

“I’m with you, Fuery,” Breda says, reaching into his coat pocket. What he extracts is a silver flask. He gives it a slight shake. “Colonel, if you’ve got anything good, we can turn this into a real hurricane party.”

“Nobody’s getting drunk tonight,” Roy says, and Breda visibly deflates. “No power and a bottle of liquor? Someone is going to end up out in the storm, or worse, they’ll throw up on my carpet and given the circumstances, we won’t know about it until sunrise.”

“Or worse,” Havoc repeats with raised eyebrows.

“Is that an  _order_ , Colonel?” Rebecca asks coyly, slipping closer to Havoc where the cushion dips under his weight.

Roy stares at her for a long moment before shaking his head and declaring, “I quit.”

He drops to the floor in front of Fuery. Roy picks up a radio and begins to fiddle with its knobs, listening for a signal among all the emanating static.

Another crack of lightning fissures through the sky, and moments later, thunder loud enough to rack the floor under Roy’s legs. Fuery nearly drops the device in his hands, fumbling until he regains his hold on it.

That’s when the lights flicker and die out. The room goes black. Roy doesn’t even get to enjoy the moment of peace where he doesn’t have to see any of his teammates for more than a millisecond before Breda swears loudly.

“Someone light a candle!” Havoc shouts. Sighing, Roy clambers to his feet. Without his vision, the storm’s cacophony seems to amplify. The rain beating against the windows and gutter, tree branches wildly raking against one another, stray garbage cans and the like clashing against the asphalt outside.

“Colonel?” Breda asks from a distance.

“Yeah, I’m here.” Roy follows his voice, pulling an ignition glove out of his pocket and tugging it on. His lieutenant blindly gropes the air before his hand clamps on Roy’s forearm. He shoves the candle into his hands and Roy snaps to light it.

A small orange flame grants them a tiny radius of light, casting shadows that dance across Breda’s face.

“Is everyone alright?” Roy calls out. He can barely see a thing even with their new source of light, though, there is just enough to make it to the candles Breda left on the counter. After everyone grumbles in affirmation, he gets to work. As they are ignited, Breda places them around the living room, creating a more substantial light source.

“Would you look at that, Mustang!” Rebecca exclaims with a grin far too bright for the circumstance. “Turns out you’re  _not_  always useless when it rains.”

“That reminds me,” says Fuery, surveying the room with a frown. “It’s been almost an hour since Lieutenant Hawkeye went to the bathroom. We should check to make sure she’s okay.”

Roy’s breath catches in his throat. In all the chaos of the storm and making sure they were prepared for a power outage, Hawkeye’s absence completely eluded him. A twinge of guilt stirs inside of him, but it’s quickly overrun with a cold, unsettling feeling that something is very wrong. He grabs the closest candle and says, “I’ll be right back.”

He makes his way into his bedroom and wills himself to relax. Ever since the Promised Day, it’s been increasingly more difficult for him to feel anything but apprehension whenever he lost track of her for long periods of time. A result of too many nights where her blood haunted his nightmares, and the memory of her cold, limp body in his arms plagued his conscious mind.

 _Stop it_ , he chides himself.  _She’s in your apartment. She’s fine. She’s--_

He presses his hand to the closed bathroom door and asks, in a voice far steadier than he would have given himself credit for, “Lieutenant, are you in there?”

Each second of silence pounds against his chest, in unison with the heavy thumping of his heart. He takes a deep breath and sets his hand on the cool metal knob.

“Lieut--”

“I’m fine,” comes a meek voice from behind the door.

Roy wants to sigh from the relief, but something still feels off. For one thing, it’s Hawkeye and  _meek_  is not a word he would ever use to describe her.

He listens more closely, but is met with silence on her end. In fact, the muffled commotion from his living room is deafening by comparison.

“Can I come in?” Roy asks cautiously, gripping the doorknob.

A few seconds. And then a soft, “Yes, sir.”

He enters and the candlelight gives him a dim view of his bathroom, completely undisturbed since his last visit. And on the floor with her knees drawn up, is his adjutant gripping the mat beneath her with shaking fingers.

Roy closes the door behind him and gets down next to her. The space is cramped and he’s nestled into the corner between a cabinet and its adjacent wall, but that loses all its importance when the light catches her face.

She’s white with terror, and her nose glows a slight shade of pink. He realizes when she brings her knuckles to her eyes that she’s been crying.

“Hayate must be so scared,” she whispers, digging the heels of her hands into her eyes. Thunder tears through the silence, and Riza jumps with a loud gasp, then buries her face into her knees. Roy notes that her shoulders tremble, and suddenly, he’s furious with himself for not coming to check on her sooner. In all the time he’d been looking for batteries and arguing with Catalina over a window, she was here, all alone.

“I’m sorry,” she says. With a shaky laugh, Riza lifts her head. She wipes her eyes, but keeps her gaze fixed on the lazy shadows that push and pull across the wall like waves. Roy sets the candle on the floor and watches her. She grips her shins so fiercely her knuckles have paled. Her short hair sticks up at odd angles, and he wonders if perhaps she’d been raking her fingers through it in her disquiet.

“I don’t like thunder,” she admits, screwing her eyes shut. “I’m okay when it rains, even when it storms, but when it’s like this...when they sound like bombs…” she draws in a shaking breath before meeting his eyes. She smiles apologetically. “I didn’t want anyone to have to worry about me. I’m sorry, Colonel.”

The realization hits Roy so suddenly that he feels lightheaded. Once when she was young, an awful storm transpired beyond the Hawkeyes’ window. Roy simply went to the study to pore over the chapters his master suggested he read before the week was over, but he distinctly recalls seeing Riza cocooned in a thick quilt, curled up on the armchair with her eyes closed when he walked past it. He hadn’t paid her any mind at the time because Roy wouldn’t have known the first thing to say. And after that night, he never thought of it again.

He looks at her now, no longer a little girl but a woman who has seen more horrors than a dozen people should see in a lifetime. Who bites back immutable pain and remorse every waking moment to fight so that no one will ever have to see those horrors again.

Riza Hawkeye is the bravest person he has ever known. And all it takes is some thunder to reduce her to this. If he weren’t so angry with himself still, he’d allow himself to find it funny. Or at least ironic. Instead, he uses the counter’s edge to hoist himself to his feet. Riza glances up at him but doesn’t ask him to stay. Roy knows she never would, anyway.

Without his only, albeit pitiful, light source, he has to maneuver through his bedroom by memory. Blindly, he reaches in front of him until his fingers brush against his dresser. He crouches down, sliding his hands over each drawer handle until they find the right one and opens it.

There lies a folded quilt, a bit of a musty smell clinging to its fibers from months of neglect. But on cold winter nights, he hardly cares when he swaddles himself in it. He throws it over his shoulder and stands, closing the drawer with his foot, and follows the crack of light that beckons from the bathroom door he’d left ajar.

Riza’s eyes widen curiously upon his return. He closes the door and reclaims his position beside her.

“You don’t have to stay here,” she says, shyly averting her eyes. “Besides, you have a room of people to attend to.”

He unfolds the blanket and gently drapes it over Riza. Astonished, she takes a corner and holds it to her heart.

“Breda has his booze,” Roy says, taking the opposite corner, “Fuery has his radio, Havoc and Catalina have each other.” He pulls his end over his shoulders so the blanket covers them both. He smiles at her, and the proximity is almost daunting. This close, underneath the same quilt, they can’t possibly be superior and subordinate. Because that would be inappropriate. Her shoulder presses against his, and her shaking slows with every passing second they remain like this.

“You have me,” he says. She smiles, and the warmth of it travels to his center, making his insides flutter.

“Thank you,” she whispers, and she does something that shocks them both, indicated by the sharp intake of breath that follows. Her hand slips into his.

Roy knows what the professional thing to do would be. But professionalism flew out the window and was devoured by the raging storm outside the moment he sat beside her and closed the door. So he does the unprofessional thing. The impulsive thing. What’s dictated by his heart and desires and nothing more complicated than that.

He weaves his fingers through hers and gives her hand a squeeze.

Two rooms over, the sound of shattered glass cuts through his ears. Riza inhales shortly, gripping Roy’s hand.

“DID I NOT TELL YOU ALL THAT THIS WOULD HAPPEN?” Rebecca shouts, sounding justifiably exasperated.

“The window,” Roy explains, releasing a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. Riza relaxes, settling back against the cabinet, but never letting go of his hand.

“Hmm,” says Riza, absently running her thumb over his. “Perhaps you should tend to that, Colonel.”

“Maybe I--”

Roy feels the next crash of thunder down to his bones. Riza tenses, gripping Roy’s arm with her free hand and digging her nose into his shoulder.

He extricates his arm from her grasp, letting her hand fall to her lap, only so he can wrap it around her trembling shoulders.

“In a minute,” he says, pressing his cheek to her hair, closing his eyes. “This is more important right now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know what it is about Riza angst that just tickles me creatively, but it does. Likely because I have a weakness for badass, stoic characters crying. Help.   
> I actually wrote this one forever ago when the hurricane was circulating my area. So I was in somewhat of a mood for it.   
> I'm AT LAST getting around to posting the chapters of this I've been hoarding!


	5. Until Sunrise

“I don’t even know where to start.”

Breda’s bewildered gaze shifts back and forth between his hospitalized superiors. Riza figured this would happen sooner than later. After all, Rebecca hadn’t even waited until Riza was fully admitted before bombarding her with the recount of all she missed while in the tunnels. Only after punctuating her recap with inquiries about the Colonel did she glance at her bloodied skin and clothes and ask, “Whoa, what in the hell happened to  _you_?”

Riza feels a chuckle building in her chest, but she stifles it, settling for a soft smile instead. It’s odd how something as benign as  _chuckling_  is something to take for granted. If she so much as tries now, the wound on her neck will ignite with pain. Thankfully, there is very little to chuckle about these days, even with the Promised Day behind them.

The Colonel is still blind and facing discharge from the military. And of course, she will follow him. It was never a question of whether she would, rather, where they’d go. This time, it’s Ishval. Soldiers or not, they will never rest easily until they know they’ve done everything possible to restore it. And they  _will_  restore it. Because it’s his dream, and the two of them will make it a reality or die trying. Like they always have.

“A ‘good to see you’re alive’ would be a nice place,” he mumbles, his unseeing eyes pointed toward his lap.

“You know Havoc almost had a heart attack when we broke the news, right?” Breda continues as if he hadn’t spoken. “Fuery  _cried_ \--”

“There was dust in my eyes,” Fuery interjects, though with little conviction. Riza sees he is too taken aback by the scene before him to fight very hard.

“I-I mean, how the hell are we  _supposed_  to react!” Breda nearly shouts. For a moment, Riza allows herself to be amused by this. She isn’t sure she’s ever seen the Lieutenant look so discomposed. “We get a visit from the Major, shirtless and covered in blood, and he mentions  _you_ got your throat slashed,” he points at Riza then shifts his focus to the Colonel, “and  _you_ , sir, were  _blinded_. Actually blinded!”

“Don’t sell my encounter short,” says Mustang with little humor. He raises his bandaged hands. “I was also stabbed.”

Breda sputters, at a complete loss, it seems. Fuery blinks a few times before regaining his will, and ability, to express anything outside the realm of paralyzing astonishment. His soft eyes find Riza, and a very small smile tugs his lips.

“Are you alright, sirs?” he asks.

Riza bows her head in a nod and smiles back at her subordinate. An image of him at HQ forms in her mind, hugging a wet, shivering puppy to his chest. For the first time, it dawns on her that if she’d bled out in that room under Central Command, Hayate would have spent days waiting for a master who would never make it home.

Of course, she’s certain Fuery would have taken good care of him in such an event. The two will always be inextricable in her mind. Two gentle hearts with fierce passion and determination. Two that she loves dearly and would have hated to leave behind.

“We are, Kain,” she says, meeting his eyes. “And I’m glad to see both of you are too.”

Both men look at their Colonel but Riza studies her subordinates and how they process the sight of him. Breda’s incredulity falls away, and the underlying grief is bared.

“Colonel,” he says quietly. “Your eyes.”

Riza casts a glance at him. It’s so minute nobody would notice if they weren’t looking for it, but he grips the bedsheets under his legs for no more than a brief second. His chest goes still and she dimly notes that her own breathing has stalled. And then he relaxes, answering his Second Lieutenant with a soft laugh.

“It’s not ideal,” he admits. He rolls his shoulders back, sitting up a little straighter. “But don’t think this is going to stop us. Whether I’m a soldier or not, there is too much left to do for me to give up. We’ve already won this fight. It’s too late to let them take anything else from us.”

From the corner of Riza’s eye, Fuery smiles. He brings his heels together and raises his arm in a salute.

“For whatever you need, sir,” he says, “I’m with you.”

Breda follows suit with a nod. “Sir.”

From her bed, Riza also raises her hand to her brow. And even though he can’t see them, Roy smiles.  

__

The last time Roy was in a hospital, he hadn’t paid any mind to the way the harsh antiseptic odor clung to the cold air. Sure, he’d noticed, but he tucked the observation away to focus on more important things. Like the forthcoming war just outside his window, for starters.

Opening his eyes is like being smothered. The entire world is just beyond a heavy black curtain. He can hear it, smell it, even touch it, but he’ll never be able to see it. And the more furiously he claws at it, the more desperately he fights to break free, he only finds it more difficult to breathe. It’s as if the black smoky tendrils of shadow that held him down on that day wind a stranglehold on his lungs.

On his first night, a nurse told him it was a panic attack.

To his left, he hears the lieutenant’s metal bedsprings cry and creak as she restlessly turns about. He grips the mattress’s edge and slowly pulls himself into a sitting position. At once, he hears her bed go silent.

“Sir,” she says, her voice sharp with alertness.

“I’m fine.” He rests comfortably against the headboard, tilting his head back, then turning it toward her. Still, nothing but black. If only she were closer, he could smell the cheap hospital shampoo in her hair or the gunpowder that always seemed to linger on her no matter what she wore. Anything that could solidify her presence.

“Lieutenant,” Roy begins, wondering if she’s looking at him, or if his blank eyes are too painful of a sight. If they’re a reminder of the one time she failed to protect him.

“I’m sorry if I woke you,” she says, her voice mangled by something Roy’s only able to discern after memorizing the nuances of her speech. She draws in a quivering breath.

“I was already awake,” he says, and frowns. He isn’t sure what time it is, but he cannot hear any outside commotion apart from the humming A/C unit and Hawkeye’s breathing. “Lieutenant, are you--”

“Just trying to find a comfortable position,” she says and immediately the bed creaks, as if she’s gone tense. More softly, she says, “I apologize for interrupting.”

“Can we please drop the formalities?” he asks. Whether he asks because her voice can only bring her so close to him on its own, or the fact that she’s overtly lying to him, he isn’t sure. He brings a hand to his face and rubs his thumb across his eyelids, as if his blindness is something to be swept away so easily.

“Sir?” she questions.

He turns his head away and chuckles. He expected as much from her. But it couldn’t hurt to try.

“Years ago,” he says, “I was Roy and you were Riza. Do you remember that, Lieutenant?”

He can’t see her. Damn it, he can’t. So why do her downcast eyes and tense shoulders slip into his mind as if he can?

She takes a measured breath. “For that life being someone else’s...I certainly remember more of it than I should.”

Roy swings his legs over the edge of the bed and his bare feet connect to the cold tile. Her voice drifts through the air and curls through his grasp like a lifeline. He wants to run his hands along its abstract surface, pulling until they come together. But he stays put.

“It’s more than we deserve,” he concedes, bowing his head. “I know that. But can we give ourselves the opportunity to be human for a moment. Until sunrise.” His eyes come to rest where he hopes she can see them. “If you’ll allow it.”

The last thing he saw was a spatter of red. Lieutenant Hawkeye, his adjutant, bodyguard, confidant, and best friend looked too still to be the same woman who swiped a leg under him to protect him from Scar. Too pale to be the girl with sun kissed shoulders setting the mail on his master’s table when he was a teenager. Too weak to be  _his_  Riza. The one who kept him alive not only physically but in every other way. Whose ailing breaths slowed his own heartbeat because the two of them simply did not exist anywhere but with each other.

He remembers how it felt to hold her, watching the color return to her face and the warmth to her body. How her blood had soaked through his coat when he squeezed her to him and buried his face in her hair.

And then, he looked into her lidded eyes and smiled because despite the horrors befalling them from every angle, at least his heart was intact and with him. In his arms. In his chest. Thrumming, breathing, pulsing, and alive.

So many things circled his mind. Fleeting confessions, desperate urges. But the relief of hearing her voice was too overwhelming. And then, their moment was gone.

But now...now they had a second chance.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he admits, a sheepish grin crossing his face. “I’ll be discharged and I know you’ll follow. And I won’t say that should be a reason to cross any boundaries because it is so much more than either of us should have.” He drops his head and grips the threadbare hem of his hospital shirt. “Tonight, though, I want you to know how glad I am that you’re alright. Not as your superior officer. As someone who cares for you.” Perhaps care isn’t a strong enough word, but Roy realizes this must be a lot to swallow at once. So he paces himself.

“Sir--” she pauses, then amends, “Roy…” Her voice is brittle, as delicate and prone to falling apart as it had been that day in the tunnels when she begged him to return to her. “Don’t ask me for something I can’t give.”

But he knows her. He knows her the way he knows the individual components of a flame. As erratic and destructive both can be.

“I won’t ask you for anything you don’t want to give,” he says. “Tell me this is too much and I promise I’ll never bring it up again.”

He hears the bed creak again, and this time, the soft pad of her steps growing louder as she approaches. Suddenly, there’s an obvious shift in the air, and he can smell the gunpowder and hospital soap wafting through it, enveloping him.

Tentatively, he reaches out and his fingertips meet the palm of her cool, outstretched hand. He inhales carefully, millions of hot nerves spiraling beneath his skin where it meets hers. Slowly, she curls her fingers in and around his. He’s sure he can feel her pulse racing.

“Are you okay?” he asks her. His free hand travels up until it makes contact with her bare arm. He slowly caresses the skin with his thumb, feeling goosebumps form under his touch.

“I…” she hesitates, breathing deeply. She runs her thumb over his bandaged knuckles. “I don’t know.”

Then, Roy does something that he knows would be incorrigible at any moment outside of this one. He pulls her to him.

They collapse together, the bed’s creaking suddenly more euphonious than music. He folds her into his arms, sinking his nose into her hair, feeling her body swell and deflate as she breathes against him. His fingertips weave through her smooth blond tresses. He presses his lips to her forehead.

That night in the tunnels collides with him like a physical blow. How close he was to losing her. To leaving words unsaid and broken promises in a corrosive puddle of blood.

“Only for tonight,” she murmurs against his chest, clutching the back of his shirt with one hand, her other trapped between their bodies.

He pulls her flush against him, breathing her in, memorizing how this feels because he knows the moment morning light breaks through, it will be like it never happened.

“Riza,” he whispers against her hair. Not Lieutenant. Not tonight. He repeats it over and over again. Like saying her name is the same as taking a breath.

They fall asleep, tangled like weeds. Confessing nothing, and not saying a word apart from each others’ first names, because the familiar, forbidden vowels and consonants hold everything they could never say out loud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a cathartic piece. Sorry that it's virtually plot-less. D:


	6. I Can't Dance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so before you read this, please know that this was MY FIRST EVER ROYAI FANFIC PIECE EVER. Actually, I think it's my first work of non-crack fanfiction ever. I posted it on Tumblr once in response to a prompt. So it's rough and likely ooc? But I still wanted to share it because it's not angst for a change. haha. I hope you're able to enjoy it <3

Riza Hawkeye doesn’t like military balls.

The problem isn’t with the event itself, she supposes, or the fact that finding a dress that covers her array is nearly impossible (though, admittedly, this doesn’t help). They’re just, in her opinion, far too long and too…obligatory.

“You could always just not come,” Breda once said in response to her overt lack of enthusiasm. But Riza knows that isn’t an option. It never was.

An event so congested, where everyone has their guard down, is ideal for a potential assailant. She’d be an idiot to leave the colonel unguarded in such circumstances. If anything, a gathering like this is where he’d need a bodyguard the most.

So she endures the superficial small talk with the higher ups and the collared dress that took her weeks to find, and later stands alone while her fingers barely graze the slit in her skirt, prepared to draw her gun if and when the time comes.

“Having fun?”

Riza grips her weapon and whirls around, exhaling a sigh of relief at the sight of the Colonel with his palms raised.

“I’ll take that as a no?” he asks with an arched eyebrow.

Reverentially, she stands a little straighter, though her heart pounds against her chest despite herself. It’s hardly the first time she’s seen him out of uniform, though that doesn’t make the sight of him any less flustering. It’s the way he gels his hair back, she thinks, and how the escaped locks frame his face–a protest to this attempt at smothering his usual dishevelment.

If he were just a man and titles didn’t separate them, she’d allow herself the liberty of thinking it was kind of sexy.

“I know you’re not big on these,” he says, sliding his hands into his pockets. Stunned, Riza raises her eyebrows.

“Did Breda tell you or am I just that obvious?” she asks.

“Neither, really,” he replies. A smirk touches his lips. “It just reminds me of when we were young. You never went to any of your school dances, at least not while I was your father’s apprentice. I figured it was because you couldn’t dance.”

A hot blush blossoms on her cheeks. She almost sputters a defense, a statement laced with both conviction and denial, but she realizes quickly how pointless that would be. This is the man who can read her mind with a single glance. If there is anyone in the world she cannot lie to, it’s Roy Mustang.

Instead, she shrugs. “I’m not here to dance.”

“It’s unlikely I’ll be assassinated tonight, you know.”

“All due respect, sir, that’s what everyone thinks before they’re assassinated.”

“Fair enough,” he concedes. His eyes linger on Riza a few seconds too long, and her blush deepens. She averts her eyes.

“Are _you_ having a good time, sir?” she asks as collectedly as she can manage.

Theatrically, he sighs, slumping forward. Riza meets his gaze again, though, with slight bemusement now. “Now that you mention it, Lieutenant, I am pretty bored.” He scratches the back of his head. Momentarily, he’s less reminiscent of her highly respected colonel and more so of the young, awkward boy learning alchemy under her father’s roof.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says, unfazed to anyone who doesn’t know her better. The side of Roy’s mouth quirks into a smile.

“Dance with me, then.” He extends his hand her way.

“Sir–”

“Come on, Hawkeye.” He chuckles, nodding with encouragement. “One dance. It’s not like these things happen every night.”

Riza stares at his open palm, knowing he’s lying to her. That he isn’t bored at all, but only engaging her because he finds it pitiful that she’s standing alone in a corner, poised to retaliate in the event of an attack.

“You know I can’t dance,” she finally says, and Roy laughs.

“So we’ll make a game out of it.” His eyebrows bounce with blithe mischief. “Every time you step on my toes, that’s one more page of paperwork you have to do for me.”

“And suddenly, this game seems less appealing.”

Roy doesn’t let up. He takes a step closer and lowers his voice so even Riza strains to hear him over the music that swells through the ballroom.

“You look beautiful tonight,” he tells her. “I promise, if anyone stares at you, it won’t be because you can’t dance.”

Something warm prickles and spreads through the center of her body. She smiles, ignoring the heat that travels up her neck.

“All right,” she says, setting her hand in his. His palm is soft without the buffer of his rough ignition gloves. And his hand feels warm as it closes around her fingers.

“But,” she says, while he leads her across the floor, to an inconspicuous location among the assemblage of dancers, “we’ll make the game interesting. Every time you step on my toes, that’s another week you’re not to tease Edward, even if he instigates.”

“And why do you assume I’m going to step on your toes?” Roy asks just as his foot catches the bottom of Riza’s dress. She stumbles forward, bracing herself by grabbing onto his shoulder as his arm instinctively loops around her waist to steady her.

He is close enough for his breath to stir the fringe of blond hair that falls against her face. She hurriedly straightens up, restoring a respectable distance between them, abashedly wondering if he could feel the racing of her heart in the split second she was pressed against him.

“That’s why,” she says, a little breathlessly.

“Hmm.” His eyes come to rest on hers, and she feels the air slowly being sucked from her lungs. She’s too aware of how his fingers curl against her waist where he holds her, and how his thumb brushes against her knuckles. She wants to look away, because what they’re doing suddenly feels dangerous.

 _It’s just a dance_ , she chides herself. _Stop making it into something that it isn’t_.

That’s when she steps on his toes.

She curses under her breath. Roy laughs softly, giving her hand a squeeze.

“One sheet of paperwork,” he teases.

“Please shut up, sir.”


	7. Lucid Dreamers

They say tragedy is the perfect wakeup call and that only in the wake of it does a person realize how they feel. Roy knows this to be untrue. Contrarily, what Riza is to him, and has been for as long as they’ve been together, is the only thing he’s never needed to question. What their potential tragedy brought on wasn’t an onslaught of feelings nor confessions of that which has always been irrevocably true to them both. It was recklessness.

The walls that kept them apart in every physical sense possible, and the distance they forged as a result, crumbled in a matter of seconds. The broken pieces violently smashed against the hard ground only to be absorbed by the blood pooling beneath her still body. In that moment, nothing mattered. Laws were trivial. Human transmutation, for only the briefest moment, felt like a small price for something invaluable. As his world drained of color, as everything he’s ever fought for dripped from his fingertips, willingly prepared to join the deconstructed barriers that kept them apart, he could do nothing but stare.

After that, his blindness was a curse. As a punishment suited only for someone who kept those god forsaken walls up like his life depended on it, that moment replayed behind his unseeing eyes over, and over, and over again.

When he was able to see again–when her color-flushed face and warm eyes pulled into his focus and dispelled his mind’s relentless, pervasive image of her that only grew more gruesome over time–he became reckless.

Of course, though the walls were gone, their feigned distance continued right where it left off, but not when they were alone. When time is so short, and consistency so fragile, much of what mattered once ceases to after a while.

Their time alone belongs only to each other.  

Reckless, indeed. But worth it, even despite that.

Riza stirs, her fingers twitching against Roy’s knee. She’s curled up on the couch with her head on his lap. Up until a moment ago, she’d been asleep. With a soft smile, Roy combs through her hair, watching golden blond strands slip through his fingers like silk.

“You awake?” he asks. His thumb brushes her ear while he plays with her hair.

Her lips pull into a smile. She hums before slowly opening her eyes.

“I doubt it.” Her voice is thick with sleep. She lets out a small chuckle. “If this is a dream, it’s certainly a nice one.”

Roy brushes her fringe away from her face and leans down to leave a kiss on her temple. Riza laughs again, and shakes her head.

“When I wake up,” she goes on, “this will have never happened.”

“Until the next dream,” Roy points out. His heart aches at the certainty in her words–certainty his better judgment cannot refute no matter how badly he wishes to.

She curls her legs further up and instinctively, Roy begins tracing slow patterns up and down her arm. If someone had told him a year ago that a sleepy Lieutenant Hawkeye would one day be snuggling on his lap, he would have probably thought him performing human transmutation far more likely. The future, in all its enigmatic chaos, is a very funny thing.

“Dreams aren’t so bad.” Riza says with a smile. “Certainly, they’re extraordinary. They don’t make any sense…but even so, you’re always safe in a dream. No matter what.”

Her eyelids flutter closed, and her hand goes slack on his knee. She whispers, “This world we’re in right now…it’s beautiful, but it’s terrifying too. Because it feels real.”

“Reality is precarious,” Roy agrees. He looks down where tumbles of blond hair have once again fallen over her face. He sees the slope of her nose and her lips forming the slightest grin.

“Mhm,” she murmurs.

“But what’s real in a dream is just as real then too.” Once again, he brushes her hair away from her face, to see how her gold lashes tickle the tops of her pink cheeks. “We’re more reckless in dreams because we don’t have a conscience to hold us back. Everything I feel here and now is just as real every day.”

“I suppose that’s true,” she says. “Still…I like lucid dreaming like this. We take our hearts with us from this world to reality but nothing is ever going to be as safe. There’s no place for this kind of bliss after we wake up. We’ve taken far too much from that world. We owe it all of our happiness.”

Roy wonders if maybe Riza does believe they’re dreaming. Because in no other circumstance would she ever bare herself like this out loud.

Or maybe she wouldn’t to anyone but him. She doesn’t need to, anyway. He already knows. And she knows that to be true.

“I can’t promise to keep you safe after we…wake up,” Roy says, his voice going perhaps a note more bleak. “But you’ll always have this, to some degree. In dreams, in reality, we’re together. I’m not sure what exactly that guarantees, but it at least brings me some comfort. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t.”

“Into bliss or into Hell,” she says. She laughs, a rare, abandonless sound Roy will never hear too many times. “I’m still going to protect you. That’s never changed.”

“I’m glad for it,” Roy says, smiling. “Whether you’re Riza or Lieutenant, I need you.”

She is certainly right. This pretend dreamworld they’ve given each other is all at once safe and perilously real. Riza is warm in his arms. He can feel her heartbeat, hear her breaths, smell her hair, touch her skin. She’s as alive right now as she will be tomorrow when she follows him through the hallway at Eastern Command. He loves her just as much now as he will when she salutes him and calls him ‘sir.’

But she is also right in that in a world run on equivalent exchange, there is just no peace for them after they open their eyes. Together, stripped of their titles and existing as Roy and Riza, they’re safe. Such can’t be said for anyplace but here.

It’s a terrifying truth. But it makes these moments all the more sacred.

“I love you,” he says, because this is the only place he can tell her everything he’s only been able to show her through stolen glances a promise to stay together until the end of the road.

“I love you too,” she says, even though he knows. Because she tells him every day by continuing to follow him despite all the pain it brings her.

After a while, his eyelids grow heavy, and they readjust so that he lies behind her, one arm wrapped around her waist, feeling the steady rise and fall of her stomach as she breathes. Their legs tangle. She presses back against him, relaxing at the warmth and assurance his body brings her.

His mouth brushes her ear when he whispers, “Thank you.” For keeping him safe in their dream. For protecting him in their reality. For being his conscience and hope and solace and light in any dimension they’re able to transcend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you remember the first installment of this compilation, I hope you were able to catch a few loose references! One was about literal dreams while this was about figurative dreams. I also hope you enjoyed if you read this <3


	8. Stardust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for Day 3 of Royai Week 2016. The theme was "Stars"

In the end, memories aren’t anything but stardust etched to souls. In a tirelessly changing world, where its natural order bends and warps at humanity’s whim, stars are a constant. Every night, they return, casting silver light over the same people and places, unwavering and relentless. They observe them, record each moment, and memorize the cracks and corners of their being, because in stars’ unchanging state, it’s the only life they have. Stars live through people. They remember their stories. Every second of history belongs to them.

There aren’t any secrets, only what the stars are willing to keep to themselves.

For now Roy is willing to trust them. He tells himself that when his lips crash against hers, leaving all his hesitance, abandon, and morality to hide within the night sky, if only for tonight.

Riza’s skin glows in the starlight that filters through his bedroom window. She arches into him, her kisses leaving sparkling heat to dance on his tongue. As her steady fingers undo the buttons of his shirt, she sighs into his mouth, perhaps guilty because of how unguilty she feels.

They don’t speak; there isn’t a need to. Everything they’ve ever wanted to say to each other has existed in the way they say nothing at all. Her protection is an embrace. His recklessness during moments of uncertainty is a pattern of fumbling apologies and sloppy kisses. Every stolen glance, brush of their hands, and the synchronization of their steps is seen and understood by the stars. Perhaps that in and of itself has more intimacy than the heat of her lips, the softness of her eyes, the harsh and desperate way her hands move across his body, and the way he continues to kiss her as if he’d been suffocating and the only way to live is by breathing her in.

He remembers the softness of her, the day he’d studied the array on her back. How her narrow shoulders timidly tucked forward as her blouse dropped to the floor in a pool of fabric. How her smooth, uncalloused hands rubbed over her chilled, bare arms. It’s a stark contrast to the hardened soldier that he kisses now. Her touch is rougher. Her eyes somehow burn with brighter intensity. Her skin is fissured by scars both external and driven far beneath her skin, and the all-knowing, unforgivable starlight memories of everything she’s done spill through the cracks.

Her lips are hard and insistent against his. Roy knows that she doesn’t love him because moments like this allow her to forget. She loves him because the only one who knows her true ugliness, perhaps even better than the night sky does, is him. He’s touched the pieces of her soul hidden even to the stars. They’ve lived the same horrors and shoulder them every day, but still find reasons to have faith in each other. Riza knows Roy’s inherent goodness the same way Roy knows his heart is safe in her hands.

“We shouldn’t do this,” she murmurs against his mouth while violently discarding her blouse. The stars practically sigh over their heads for all the times they’ve heard her say this.

“Hmmm,” Roy drags his lips to her jaw, pressing soft kisses into her skin. She hums appreciatively when his mouth finds her neck.

“So,” she whispers, touching him with stunning gentleness. “This will be the last time.”

“Last time,” he murmurs into her collarbone, pushing her bra strap down her shoulder.

This exchange is stardust. A replayed a memory. Empty promises they both know they’ll eventually break time and time again.


	9. When You Think I Don't Notice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written as a response to the drabble prompt: “I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I don’t notice.”

The incessant knocking outside Roy’s door rouses him from sleep. His eyelids twitch as it cracks through the peaceful patter of rain on his windowpane. He rolls over, his bedside clock too blurry to read. Delirium and sleep slowly ebb away to reveal that it’s quarter to two in the morning.

“What?” he groans, dragging his body out of bed.

Groggily, he makes it to the door. He braces a hand on its cool knob and asks, “Who’s there?”

“I’m sorry,” the familiar voice slurs. Suddenly Roy is awake. Why is she _slurring_?

He opens the door, and his Captain stumbles in, having been leaning on the door from the other side. She straightens, looking at Roy through lidded eyes.

“Captain,” he says, blinking out of his stupor.

Her waterlogged clothes cling to her body, dripping water that is beginning to form a puddle around her feet. She absently brushes her wet bangs away from where they’d stuck to her face.

“You’re awake,” she murmurs.

“You’re drunk,” he replies. He searches her unfocused eyes. Worry carves into the center of his gut. His hands twitch by his sides, overtaken by a sudden urge to touch her. But he maintains his distance.

She runs a hand up her arm, staring thoughtfully at the sofa over Roy’s shoulder. Then she chuckles, swaying on her feet a bit.

“So I am,” she says.

Roy’s heart pounds against his chest. This is the second time he has seen Hawkeye drunk. The first was a short time after their return from Ishval, when they’d ended up in the same bar. It would have been easy to miss her beneath the bar’s dim lights and its otherwise bustling commotion. But the memory of her in that hopeless desert throbbed in his mind. It was as consistent as his own heartbeat. No matter how hard he tries, even still, he will never forget the cold disillusionment that shadowed her eyes when she pulled that pale hood off of her head.

He had half a mind to say something to her back then, as she’d sat alone in a corner booth with a near-empty glass of whiskey in hand. He thought better of it when he noticed the way her shoulders shook with silent sobs. All of his resolve diminished as he was faced with the weight of everything he’d done, and how his abuse of her secrets and her own bloodied hands would continue to plague her for as long as she lived. Roy simply couldn’t face her. So he walked out, leaving her alone yet again.

When he burned her back, only a few nights later, he didn’t mention having seen her at all. And he didn’t say a word while his flames devoured her skin. She’d screamed, digging her fingernails into her arms until blood rose and flooded the crescent indentations left behind. But he retained his precision and contrite resoluteness.

When it was over, she lay hunched over on his floor, shivering between harsh sobs. He hated himself. He wanted to scream. He had the urge to drop down beside her and cradle her body to his, weeping apologies that would never amount to the remorse he will irrevocably carry with him. But all he did was take her by the elbow, help her to his couch, wordlessly tend to her burns, and finally wait for her to pass out.

Only then did he slip into the hallway and break apart. Biting his knuckles, crying into his hand, gasping out _I’m sorry_ until the words were etched to his tongue, unspokenly slipping between the syllables of everything he’d ever say to her from that moment on.

But that was before.

There seems to be a lifetime between then and now. She isn’t an unrecognizable shell of Master Hawkeye’s daughter–a kid forced to grow up with a gun in her hand, adopting the years stolen by her bullets. She’s his Captain, adjutant, and conscience. He breathes only through her lungs, because a life without her is incomprehensible. There isn’t any reason for him to hide what he’s thinking simply because they are inextricable parts of each other.

“I came here for a reason,” she declares weakly. Her eyebrows furrow, like she’s concentrating on forming coherent thoughts out of the fragments tumbling around her mind.

“Did you drive here?” Roy asks. She’s drenched, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have just walked up to his door without an umbrella. To his relief she shakes her head.

“That would be reckless.” She swallows, then smiles somewhat sardonically. “I am not reckless.”

“No,” says Roy carefully. He wants to approach her, but his legs are suddenly very stiff. “You’re not.”

“I was out,” she says, clenching and unclenching a pale fist by her side. “And I was thinking about things.”

“Things,” Roy repeats, his mind whirling.

“Old wounds.” She shivers, from the cold perhaps, then crosses her arms. “And some new. My father, Ishval, the Promised Day.” Her eyes close. She shakes her head. “You’ve always been my constant. You’re tied to each of my scars.”

Roy’s eyes travel to the only one that’s exposed. The raised white scar tissue peaking out from the collar of her shirt. His heart grows heavy.

“Captain,” be starts.

“I don’t blame you for any of it,” she says, bringing her eyes up to his, though they lack the focus normally characteristic of her. “I made my choices just like you made yours. If I don’t have that much, none of these scars mean anything.”

She averts her eyes to the small pool of water by her feet. When she looks back up, her cheeks are tinged with pink.

“I’m sorry, Colonel,” she says with a self-deprecating chuckle. Roy doesn’t bother to correct her on his rank. Whether she calls him Colonel, General, or something else entirely, it’s only mask they’ve both grown comfortable hiding behind.

Roy forces himself to take a step back, and then another. His heavy legs continue the motion until his muscles catch up to his brain and carry him around the couch and to the hallway.

“You said you came for a reason,” he says over his shoulder. “For whatever reason that is, you’re more than welcome to stay.”

He speaks reverentially because he falls into this role too innately. To a certain degree, he doesn’t even notice the difference between how he acts and how he feels. In his mind, the lines drawn between them have blurred far too much over the years. She is his subordinate. She pulses in his chest. Such a thing isn’t normal in any other circumstance. But somehow, they have redefined that. Their unique reliance of each other, with or without ranks, is unequivocal.

She knows this. She doesn’t need to question it. They don’t express themselves with anything but their overt willingness to die for each other. Titles shield them from the world, but they do nothing to protect them from each other.

Roy enters his bedroom and pulls a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt out of his bedside drawer. He drapes them over his arm, bringing them back into the living room where Hawkeye hasn’t moved from her position by the door.

“We can throw your clothes in the dryer,” she says, handing her his spares. “But you should change before you catch a cold.”

She takes them from him. Water droplets fall off the ends of her hair and soak into the fabric. She closes her fists around them and nods, stepping out of her wet shoes and padding off to the bathroom to change.

He waits for her for a few minutes and in that time has begun steeping a cup of chamomile tea. After she emerges and they put her wet clothes to dry, the two of them settle on his couch. There is enough space between them to fit two people.

By now, she holds the mug of chamomile, the steam running across her lips as she brings it up.

“I came here tonight because I wanted you to know it isn’t your fault,” she says. She takes a sip, then holds the mug against her lap.

Roy feels the breath escape him for a moment. He stares at her.

“I’m hurting you,” she says, looking down into her mug. Her drying hair curls slightly around her jaw. “And it’s only gotten worse since the Promised Day.”

Roy is at a loss for words. He shakes his head, and wonders why hearing her say this makes his veins buzz.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. _I’m the one who’s hurt you. I haven’t stopped hurting you since the day we met_.

“I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I don’t notice,” she says in a near-whisper. Her eyes come to his like a bullet in the chest. He’s tempted to draw away from that gaze, but somehow, he’s trapped.

“I don’t–”

“You look sorry,” she says. “Even hopeless sometimes. Like you hate yourself for what’s become of us.”

“I don’t,” he says. It is true. He doesn’t hate himself for what they are. He hates himself for being too selfish for that. Too afraid of a life where she isn’t by his side.

“Sometimes I hate myself too,” she admits. She frowns into her tea. “But it isn’t for anything I didn’t choose. I’ve selfishly tied you to my burdens, but I’ve never pulled a trigger of anyone’s volition but my own.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. He doesn’t know what else could capture how he feels.

“So am I.” Her shoulders twitch and she shuts her eyes tightly. She’s trying not to cry. Roy has been able to recognize this mannerism ever since she was a teenager. “Let me bear my own burdens, General. Don’t take responsibility for my choices. And don’t look at me as if I’m something you’ve broken.”

She looks at him now with the same solemn acceptance she did the day she asked him to burn the secrets off her back. He hadn’t agreed to it because he felt responsible for her own grief. He’d done it because she wanted freedom. In a harsh world that has stripped her of everything, she deserved at the very least to be whichever version of Riza Hawkeye she chose. Because of him, she could never be severed from the secrets that bind her to her father. But perhaps following him was both out of trust and penance.

“You’re not broken,” he says.

“We’re all broken,” she replies, a sad smile crossing her lips. “I shudder to imagine anyone experiencing the things we have, and coming out of it unscathed.”

It rings true. No one returns from the battlefield the same way they left. Somehow, it either breaks or intoxicates you.

She scoots closer to him, setting the mug down on the coffee table in front of her. She takes Roy’s hand and brings it to her neck. He stiffens, knowing she would never be so bold if not for the alcohol.

She runs the tips of his fingers under the collar of his T-shirt that she wears, to her scar. Neither of them breathes. Her flushed neck is almost feverish to his touch.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, though a hot blush spread across her face when their eyes meet. Roy swallows carefully, inhaling a wavering breath.

“I…” This close, he can barely remember his own name, let alone where their physical and emotional boundaries are normally drawn.

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” she says warningly.

“I almost lost you.”

Her hand drops from his as his fingers travel over the scar. He feels her pulse beneath his fingertips, indicating that this is real and she’s still with him. She will never understand how hopeless he felt, watching her fight to stay alive through his swimming vision.

His hand rests on the crook of her neck, heated by her bare skin. A switch goes off and it tears through the formalities he’s fooled himself into thinking would ever keep them apart. When have they ever been? What they have has always existed within each other.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she says.

His head drops to her other shoulder. She slides her fingers through his hair. Have they ever been this close? Why does this feel so easy for both of them?

Does it even matter?

“Riza, I almost lost you.”

She sighs. He feels her lips rest atop his head. “But I’m here.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers into her shoulder, for all the times he hadn’t.

“Don’t be.”

She could spend a lifetime asking this of him, and he’ll spend just as long failing to convey how such a meager apology will never be enough. For now, though, he listens to her. Because they’re both tired. Because this is hurting her. Because despite it all, he’s still so selfish, taking comfort in the way they are entangled because it means they’re both alive in whatever shape this relentless world has left them in.


	10. Naked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written in response to the drabble prompt: “Is there a reason you’re naked in my bed?”

Riza turns the shower knob, cutting the water off with a firm squeak. She gathers her dripping hair in her hands and wrings it out and then grabs a towel off the motel bathroom’s rack to wrap herself in.

She should be meeting with the team in a little while so the Colonel can fill them in on what was discussed at his meeting tonight. She figures that gives her at least another few minutes to herself, so she takes her time in getting ready.

Trapped in her room’s small bathroom, the steam from her shower sticks to her skin in a humid sheen. When she opens the door, the fresh air cools her bare arms and shoulders. Between their initial meeting at Eastern, to the train, to the first night of their investigation, Riza realizes this is the first time she’s actually been alone all day.

Wrapping her towel more firmly around herself, she pads into the room, taking a seat on the floral-patterned bed. Its springs creak beneath her weight. The motel might be half a step higher than a dump, but as far as she’s concerned, it’s a place to sleep and best of all, it’s private.

She looks behind her, for the bag she left on the bed upon checking in, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere in sight. Perhaps it fell off while she was out. She cranes her neck, peering over the edge of the bed. The brown carpet floor is bare.

Riza sighs. Surely no maids have come in and rummaged through her things. Anyway, she has confidence that the handgun she packed would be enough of a deterrent in such an event.

Could she have placed it elsewhere? She had been in a hurry. Her memory is likely just failing her. She stands and starts exploring the room, checking the closet, under the bed, even once more in the bathroom, but finds nothing.

“Okay,” she murmurs out loud, placing her hands on her hips, tapping her bare foot. “Where in the hell did I…” She trails off when her gaze lands on a black duffel bag tossed by the entrance of the room.

That duffel bag does _not_ belong to her.

Riza’s eyes widen in horror.

No. Absolutely not. There is no way she’s–

She hears the unmistakable sound of a key jamming into its lock. Riza swears under her breath and spins, her heart just about ready to burst out of her chest.

When she hears the telltale click of an opened lock, all rational thought disappears and suddenly, she jumps onto the bed. Somewhere in the motion her towel comes undone, so she hurls it into the open closet, then yanks the bed’s covers over her face.

She hears the door open and close as he enters. Riza can feel every inch of her skin heating, from her forehead down to the tips of her fingers and toes.

Followed by the sound of fabric scratching against fabric, she feels a heavy garment fall atop her legs. His coat.

 _Please don’t be undressing_ , Riza prays silently. _Please go use the bathroom so I can leave unseen_.

The Colonel sighs, and Riza can swear she hears the individual pop of his buttons being undone.

“No one is more over this unnecessarily long day than me,” Mustang murmurs to himself, shedding his dress shirt and tossing it atop Riza to join his coat.

She grimaces. Her stomach tumbles more with each passing second. This is absolute agony.

 _He has to shower eventually_ , she thinks meekly. _I can hold out until then_.

Mustang sighs audibly and sits at the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. Riza’s knee lies dangerously close. She holds her breath.

 _No_ , she begs. _Please, no. Take a shower, sir. You’ve been out all day. A shower would do you so much good_.

He falls back, but the moment he makes contact with Riza’s body, he springs back up. Riza grits her teeth, holding in a squeak.

There are hands running up and down her legs through the blanket followed by an incredulous, “What the _hell_?”

Riza braces herself as the top part of the covers are drawn away from her face, exposing her. She clutches the blanket to her bare chest with one hand and drags the other down her face, squeezing her eyes closed so that she doesn’t have to look at him.

The air is absolutely palpable. For a long while, neither of them says a word. Finally, she cracks an eye open and sees that the Colonel, very much shirtless, is staring at her, his jaw unhinged, and redder than the apple painted on the tacky fruit portrait hung over the bed.

“Lieu– _Lieutenant_!” he stammers.

“There is a perfectly good explanation for this,” Riza supplies quickly. She refuses to sit up, lest she expose more of herself than she has already.

“You’re,” he begins in disbelief.

“Sir, I know–”

“You’re _naked_.”

“Yes,” she says, wishing more than anything that she could die right at this very moment and become one with the tense, dust-embedded air of this room.

“I know this looks bad,” she says with a voice she has managed to keep impressively measured. She pinches the bridge of her nose, then hides her face into her palm. There is absolutely no good way to go about this. She’s naked in her superior officer’s bed. That is an indisputable fact.

“Is there,” he begins, then pauses, running both hands through his hair, trying to find the proper words for this. As if such a thing exists. “Hawkeye, is there a _reason_ you’re naked in my bed?”

“I,” she says, so hot that the blanket’s added warmth has now made her sweaty. As if being naked and damp from the shower wasn’t bad enough. “Sir, I made a mistake. I thought this was my room when I came in to take a shower, and…” She stops. Why even bother? What is going to make this situation any less horrifying?

She remembers now that he’d given her a spare key to his room in case of an emergency. She must have not paid attention to which key she’d taken out of her pocket when coming back to the motel. She hadn’t bothered to memorize the room since the number dangled from its ring anyway.

Perhaps she should have been more careful.

“And you happened to _miss_ my things lying by the door?” he asks her.

Riza pulls the blanket over her head, sinking back into the bed. Her muffled voice comes through the covers. “I am as mortified as you are, Colonel.”

Suddenly, she feels the weight of more clothes fall upon her. She lowers the blanket from her eyes and sees that he’s tossed her a sweatshirt and men’s pajama bottoms.

“I…um.” He nods at the clothes. “You can put those on so that you can go to your room.”

Riza takes the sweatshirt and holds it to her bare chest. Her fingers tighten around the soft fabric.

“I apologize, sir,” she says quietly.

Though he’s flushed to the roots of his hair, he gives her a small smile. “Don’t mention it. Normally, I’d be ecstatic to find a beautiful woman in my bed…but…” He rubs the back of his neck, and now when Riza blushes, it has nothing to do with her lack of clothing.

“I’m just glad it was you and not Breda,” he says through a chuckle.

Riza allows herself to laugh, even though this might very well be the single most awkward moment of her life.

Roy dramatically covers his eyes and turns toward the wall while Riza slips into the sweatshirt and pants. He faces her again when she assures him she’s decent.

“Thank you,” she says, standing up, crossing her arms over her chest. “And, once more, Colonel, I apologize for–”

“Not a word,” he says. Something in the way he looks at her wearing his clothes makes Riza feel even more exposed than she’d been a minute ago. But it brings a different feeling to her stomach. A lighter, more fluttery sensation she most certainly should not be feeling while her half-naked superior officer looks at her.

“I’ll go get dressed then,” she says, pointing to the door, “in my clothes, of course, and then meet the rest of you to discuss…”

“Right,” he says quickly, looking away and scrubbing his face with his hand. “Right, of course. I’ll see you, Hawkeye.”

Awkwardly, she salutes him before walking into the bathroom to pick up her clothes, and exiting the room as quickly as she possibly can.


	11. His Silver Light

Roy doesn’t open his eyes to the hospital room he’d been trapped in for days. He opens his eyes to stars. Even before his sight had been taken, he felt a lot more comfortable under the veil of night. Daylight was scorching, like the desert that swallowed the breaths he turned to ashes with a snap of his fingers. The pain of the ever-present stranglehold his sins held him in moved his legs when they were too heavy for him to walk on his own. It was one way he knew he was still alive. The anguish was how he knew he _needed_ to be.

He couldn’t escape the daylight. Even blinded, he felt it burning through his clothes, sinking into his veins like a drug that could all at once kill and sustain him. He needed it, even though it made him hate himself. He needed the reminder that the sun could shine light even on unforgiving places. That not all stars were easy to look at.

But nighttime was different. This form of starlight was somehow more self-aware than that cast by the sun. It followed him constantly, but it only ever guided him through darkness, knowing where it was most needed. Its twinkling rays reached out to him, tickling the palms of his hands, weaving through his fingers and pulling him along a minefield of uncertainty. A starless sky may leave him paralyzed in terror, but with his silvery companion, he will always remember who he is and where he’s going.

So he doesn’t open his eyes to the fluorescent lights of his hospital room. He opens his eyes to a face stunned into silence. Her brown eyes trail his face, casting silver light over every feature they drink in. He watches her with the precariousness one may watch a spinning top with before it loses its balance and topples over.

On his other side, Doctor Marcoh runs him through a series of questions that Roy only half-remembers answering by the time he’s through. He stays only long enough to make sure there were no problems with the transmutation before he steps out, allowing the two soldiers a much desired moment of privacy.

When he parts his lips to speak, her chest goes still. And just like that, he forgets every word in the Amestrian language. It wouldn’t matter either way. None could ever do justice to the way his heart jogs. It pounds his chest as if to nudge him forward, begging him to do something. To take her starry hands in his and kiss them until their light burns his lips.

He doesn’t blink. She doesn’t move. His bandaged hand raises between them and suddenly it’s cupping the side of her face. Reflexively, she relaxes, letting out a slow, even breath. But her eyes stay trapped in his.

His thumb brushes the slope of her nose, the soft underside of her eye where her lashes tickle him, down her cheek, over the warmth of her lips. There, he lingers for a few seconds too long. Electricity sparks in his fingertips everywhere they end and she begins. For a moment, all he can think is that he never needed eyes to see her. He remembered every line and curve of her face with perfect clarity because she will always be a part of him, no matter how far they’ve ever been pulled apart.

He takes a careful breath, waiting for her to tell him this isn’t what she wants.

She doesn’t.

Her eyes flood with tears. Between one blink and the next, they roll down her cheeks, slipping over his thumb. She doesn’t say a word, but with that, she tells him how afraid she’d been. Perhaps not after the fact, or even when they’d been discussing their plans for the future in this very room with their teammates. But for the time in the tunnels that they spent apart. She’s overrun with every heavy minute that settled on her chest, suffocating her, and the agonizing darkness neither of them could find their starlight guide to pull them through.

Rarely does he look at her and see the young girl from her father’s grave. That girl was taken by the cruelty of the world. Beaten, bent, ravaged to pieces that ultimately reconstructed into the woman who vowed to follow him into Hell. But right now, he sees the same barefaced hope and trust he’d come to know in Master Hawkeye’s daughter. The one he begged Roy to protect.

How backwards his master had it then. Who could have ever prepared either of them for the brilliant sharpshooter, broken in all the same ways as Roy, who would become his armor in every sense of the word.

He takes her face in both of his hands, brushing warm tears away from flushed cheeks. She takes in a shaking breath, then laughs. It’s a supernova right before his eyes.

“You’re,” he begins, but trails off. She’s what? Here? Real? His anchor and heartbeat and light and safety?

“You’re beautiful,” he settles with. It isn’t enough. How could such a weighted word _still_ not be enough? Maybe because stars aren’t necessarily beautiful. At least not _just_. They’re extraordinary. A miracle that never stops existing. His fingertips trace the planes of her face.

“You’re out of line, Colonel,” she croaks, but she never tells him to stop. This time he laughs, and it draws a smile out of her. She slips her hand over the one that rests on her face. She closes her eyes, sighing with relief.

 _You’re safe_ is what she means. He knows that. The words find his heart in the way she grips his hand, breathes in tandem with him, and envelops him in her light’s embrace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this inspired by a headcanon by The Flame and Hawk's Eye on Tumblr! Wherein when Roy regains his sight, he just sits there and touches Riza's face. It melted me D; (http://the-flame-and-hawks-eye.tumblr.com/post/148027658461/)   
> I'm sorry if the writing of this was overbearing. I've debated posting to Ao3 for a little while because I wasn't certain the prose made any sense or if it was just a really abstract and flowery disaster that didn't actually convey anything. But people on Tumblr were really nice about it so skjdhgklsajhgskjh  
> I really really love star metaphors/imagery ;;  
> I hope you enjoyed!!!


	12. Confessions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> written for the prompt: “Hey, I’m with you, okay? Always.” on Tumblr

Although the Colonel’s impromptu appearance on Riza’s doorstep is disorienting on its own, she is even more puzzled by the haphazardly wrapped lump he holds in his arms. She glances down at it, then her eyes rise to meet his.

“Sir, I wasn’t expecting you,” she says. It isn’t a particularly late hour, but it’s still an unusual time for a visit, especially because they’d been discharged from the hospital just yesterday. They hadn’t even gotten the opportunity to return to HQ yet. Riza narrows her eyes and carefully asks, “Is everything alright?”

He lifts the package with an easy smile. “I brought you a gift.”

Hesitantly, she takes it from him, its weight taking her by surprise. She shoots him a skeptical look as she tears away the brown paper wrapping.

Riza lets the shreds of paper fall to the floor. She turns the gift around in her hands, chuckling.

“A vase,” she says with amusement. Her eyes flicker up. “Most men would bring a woman flowers after she’s been hospitalized.”

The smile doesn’t leave his face. “Lest we forget the last time I tried to do that.”

Riza walks into the house, setting the vase on the nearest counter. It’s quite pretty. A translucent red so deep it’s almost black. It will look really beautiful with roses. Maybe that’s something she can look forward to.

“Thank you,” she says. She gives him a small smile. “It’s beautiful.”

He stays put outside her door, shifting his weight back on his heels as he slips his hands into his coat pockets now that he no longer has the vase to occupy them. Suddenly, Riza is all too aware of the fact that they’re both in civilian clothes, after dark, meeting on casual circumstances that have nothing to do with work.

“I…” she begins, then stops herself. She averts her eyes, though she isn’t sure why. Nothing about their relationship has ever been complicated. Why is she suddenly so unsure of how to proceed. She opts for, “Um, sir, how are your eyes?”

He blinks as if he didn’t expect the question. “Oh.” He absently runs his thumb across one of his lids like he’d done back when they were in the hospital and he was still blind. His lip quirks back up. “They’re fine. Good as new.”

His eyes trail her face. Riza has noticed ever since his vision was restored, something changed in the way he looked at her. It wasn’t bad by any means, nor was it even uncomfortable. There was something close to a desperate fascination in it. It was as if he was looking at her for the first and last time all at once.

“Lieu – Hawkeye,” he says, tripping over her name like he isn’t quite sure which feels right for tonight. He looks curiously boyish right now. “Do you want to go somewhere?”

* * *

The car ride away from the city is spent in comfortable silence. Riza tilts her head back against the seat, drinking in the starlight’s peaceful company. It reminds her of the aftermath of a mission, when the adrenaline has left for the night and she and the Colonel would drive back to the office, melting against their seats from relief. It always meant that they’d made it through another day. That they were yet another step closer to changing the world. That for that night, the fighting was over.

They make it onto a dirt road that cuts into the woods. The tires bump and teeter as the car moves along. Gnarled branches curl through and around one another, creating whimsical arches over them.

Riza catches a glimpse of Roy driving. He holds the steering wheel with ungloved hands and watches the road with a soft smile, as if it and this moment are home to him.

Riza settles back and smiles too. Words are messy, so they’ve learned to speak without them. Moments like this are what tell her what they’ve never been able to say out loud. This is how they exist, and how they understand each other. She wishes she could capture this night, this feeling, as something tangible and keep it with her forever.

The branches disappear behind them, replaced by moon and starlight as the road brings them to a short wind up a hill. Roy parks the car at the top and then powers it off.

“I’ve always liked this spot,” he says in a reflective way. His voice is intimate, like a feather-soft kiss on her ear.

“Yeah?” She’s inclined to lean closer, so she doesn’t miss any inflection of his words and what they mean to him.

“Come on.” A childlike gleam crosses his eyes. He opens the door and steps out. “You have to see the outside.”

She follows him and is bitten by the wind’s chill once her feet land on the grass. She pulls the ends of her coat more firmly around herself as she walks to the front of the car.

Another gust of wind tosses Roy’s hair around his head. Riza combs her fluttering fringe away from her forehead and settles next to him against the hood of the car.

Down below, she can make out a portion of Central City. Light spills onto the streets like dull embers glowing between the cracks of a dying coal fire. She smiles, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Everything looks so…far away,” she says.

“Crazy, isn’t it?”

Under the moonlight, with his tousled hair and abandonless smile, he doesn’t look like a soldier at all. Right now he reminds her more of the kind and studious young boy she met when he was her father’s alchemy apprentice. It’s almost innocent, if not for the years, horrors, and experiences that she knows harden him any place but with her.

It’s when she sees this that she realizes he asked her to come here for a reason. Not necessarily to show her this, though she doesn’t doubt that holds importance to him too. He wanted the opportunity to be honest in a way he’s only ever been with her.

“Colonel,” she says softly.

He chuckles, shaking his head. “Let’s not do that. Not tonight.” His eyes fixate on the city before them, his lips in an indiscernible half-smile. “The life of a soldier isn’t one with any room for regrets. I know Hughes didn’t have any.” His smile falls and his eyes close. “In the tunnels…when I held you and you were unresponsive I was stricken with regret. Things I should have said. Time I shouldn’t have wasted–”

“That isn’t our choice to make,” says Riza, even though admitting it leaves an ache in her chest. How many times has she looked at him, knowing that they’ve sacrificed their right to belong to each other because the only future that should exist is one where they belong to the world they would rebuild. The very same world they destroyed.

“I know that,” he says. “And I’d never throw away everything we’ve worked for. It isn’t about that.” He opens his eyes and he looks at her with the attention he would an alchemic array. Wonder, curiosity, and the irrefutable sense that this is a part of him. That he’s where he belongs. “I’m tired of pretending that I don’t love you. I’ll keep lying to the world for as long as I need to. I just can’t lie to you. Not after that. Not after I almost lost you.”

A blush creeps up Riza’s neck and spreads across her cheeks. For the first time, he has left her completely speechless.

Her heart racks against her chest and she hopes that the proximity doesn’t make him privy to it. She wants to speak, to say _anything_ , but all she can do is stare.

“I’ll say it once and then, I promise, I’ll never say it again.” He takes a deep breath, clenching his fists by his sides, hesitant to touch her. “I love you.”

Finally, her tongue springs loose and the words that had been caught in her throat stumble free. “You know how I feel.”

“I know,” he says and the fact that he doesn’t look wounded by the statement is a testament to how well they know each other. “And it’s enough. More than enough.” He looks back toward the city.

“It’s not so daunting from up here,” says Roy, nodding that way. “You know, I’ve never deluded myself into thinking one person was big enough to do anything but protect the people they love. Even so, sometimes I’m paralyzed by a fear that I can’t even do that.” He smiles at her. With cheeks flushed from the chilly air and his hair blowing away from his face, Riza is once again taken aback by how young he looks.

“But then I remember that I’m not alone,” he says. “I have a good team. Good people working under and with me.” He nudges her playfully and she smiles. “And I have you. I know I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

“Hey.” Riza’s loops one of her arms around his, pressing her cheek to his shoulder as they both look out to the city. The enveloping smell and feel of him is all too safe. It’s perfect. His head rests against hers. “I’m with you. Always.”

“I know that,” he says. “Thank you.”

Her eyes flutter closed as she’s caught up in the bliss of the moment. Words are messy. Their lives are complicated. What they feel for each other will never be less true simply because they cannot say it, whether it be because of the law or any other personal penance they may have sentenced themselves to.

But still, she finds herself wanting to hear him tell her again and again until she knows she will never forget the exact way it sounds. She wants to lock that memory in her heart. A confession isn’t any more palpable than unspoken truths, but it’s still beautiful and important in its own way.

She sighs against him and says, “I love you too, Roy.”


End file.
